“The upper house is rectangular, measuring 80 feet by 100 feet, and is built with the cardinal points to within a few degrees. The pile is from 12 to 15 feet in height, and its massiveness suggests an original height at least twice as great. The plan is somewhat difficult to make out on account of the very great quantity of débris.
“The walls seem to have been double, with a space 7 feet between; a number of cross-walls at regular intervals indicate that this space has been divided into apartments, as seen in the plan.
“The walls are 26 inches thick, and are built of roughly dressed stones, which were probably laid in mortar, as in other cases.
“The enclosed space, which is somewhat depressed, has two lines of débris, probably the remains of partition-walls, separating it into three apartments, a, b, c [note]. Enclosing this great house is a network of fallen walls, so completely reduced that none of the stones seem to remain in place; and I am at a loss to determine whether they mark the site of a cluster of irregular apartments, having low, loosely built walls, or whether they are the remains of some imposing adobe structure built after the manner of the ruined pueblos of the Rio Chaco.
“Two well-defined circular enclosures or estufas [kivas] are situated in the midst of the southern wing of the ruin. The upper one, A, is on the opposite side of the spring from the great house, is 60 feet in diameter, and is surrounded by a low stone wall. West of the house is a small open court, which seems to have had a gateway opening out to the west, through the surrounding walls.
“The lower house is 200 feet in length by 180 in width, and its walls vary 15 degrees from the cardinal points. The northern wall, a, is double and contains a row of eight apartments about 7 feet in width by 24 in length. The walls of the other sides are low, and seem to have served simply to enclose the great court, near the center of which is a large walled depression (estufa B).”
The number of buildings that composed the Aztec Spring village ([fig. 1]) when it was inhabited can not be exactly estimated, but as indicated by the largest mound, the most important block of rooms exceeds in size any at Mitchell Spring Ruin. While this village also covered more ground than that at Mud Spring, it shows no evidence of added towers, a prominent feature of the largest mound of the latter. Two sections ([fig. 1, A, B]) may be distinguished in the arrangement of mounds in the village; one may be known as the western and the other as the eastern division.
Fig. 1.—Ground plan of Aztec Spring Ruin.
The highest and most conspicuous mound of the western section (A) is referred to by Professor Holmes as the “Upper House.” Surface characteristics now indicate that this is the remains of a compact rectangular building, with circular kivas and domiciliary rooms of different shapes, the arrangement of which can not be determined without extensive excavations. The plan of this pueblo published by Holmes[26] shows two large and one small depression, indicating peripheral rectangular chambers surrounded by walls of rectangular rooms.